4 Web Design Mistakes That Are Disastrous for SEO

There are some who think that it’s one thing to design a website that appeals to users and another that scores high on SEO. In reality, both are extremely important and website developers should never ever sacrifice one for the other. Here are some common web design mistakes that can really hurt your rankings.

Not Including the HI Tags

You can have the snazziest of websites yet be in a situation where it lies unexplored by users simply because the top rated search engines just have not discovered it yet. This can happen if your web designer has simply forgotten to insert an H1 tag to the home page for the search engine bots to pick up and analyze what the page content is all about. By ensuring that the H1 tag contains the target keyword, web designers can avoid one of the most common web design mistakes and improve their search engine rankings.

Including Large Media Files and Images

Everyone knows that pictures and videos are great for creating user engagement, however, you need to be careful about the file sizes as multiple large images or media files can substantially slow down the page loading. When this happens there are two consequences; users get frustrated with the slow speed and are likely to abandon the site and the search engines are inclined to downgrade the site in their rankings. To get an idea of just what Google thinks about your site’s speed, you can try out Google PageSpeed Insights Test that will reveal the images that need optimization. Screaming Frog is another great tool for locating large image and media files that need to be compressed and uploaded again. Learn more on these and other website speed test tools.

Including Pop-ups Web Design Mistakes

Many website developers favor using pop-ups and interstitials to draw the attention of users to special announcements. However, users feel that these are extremely intrusive and not conducive to a good browsing experience. In recent times, Google has also become aware of this problem and warned websites to stay clear of such disturbing techniques. Google has been laying a lot of stress on the importance of a good UX. Moreover, it drives down the ranking of sites that have pop-ups interfering with content access by users.

Including Text in Images

By making the last of 4 web design mistakes – including text in images – website developers can not only give an extra punch to the images but also make the images more discoverable by search engines. However, this is only achieved when the text is in a separate layer over the image and not integrated into the image as then it can’t be read by the search engine. Further, text integrated into the images can become completely unreadable in responsive web design where the image dimensions go down in keeping with the screen size.

Web Design Mistakes Conclusion

When developing a website, the design should definitely be one that the user will find interesting. While the content relevance and usefulness is of paramount importance, it is also vital to keep in mind the various factors that are important from the SEO perspective.

Have you ever made the web design mistakes mentioned in this article? Can you recommend more ways to overcome them? Share your thoughts in the comments section!